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Place Matters is a joint
initiative of City Lore and the Municipal Art Society. Founded in 1893, the
Municipal Art Society continues to serve as one of New York City’s premiere
advocates for intelligent urban design, planning and preservation. City Lore
was founded in 1986 with a mission to foster New York City—and America's—living cultural heritage through education and public programs.

City Lore documents,
presents, and advocates for New York City's grassroots cultures to ensure their
living legacy in stories and histories, places and traditions. In 1988, City
Lore established the "Endangered Spaces” project to identify and advocate for
local establishments and landmarks that were disappearing from the New York
City landscape. In part, the rapid diminution of community loci resulted from
the fact that these sites were unknown to preservationists, or difficult to for
preservationists to interpret and therefore to protect.

In 1996, City Lore and the
Municipal Art Society formed a Task Force on Historical and Cultural Landmarks,
and collaborated on a conference called "History Happened Here,” which was held
at the Museum of the City of New York. Two years later, City Lore and the
Municipal Art Society jointly established the Place Matters program so as to
continue to celebrating and advocating for places that hold memories, anchor
traditions and help to tell the history of New York City. The goal of Place
Matters is to broaden the ways preservation is understood and practiced in New
York City by offering alternative ways of identifying, celebrating, and
ultimately preserving places that matter. This essay explores various strategies developed to meet these goals: place marking, Place Matters awards, community focus projects, and virtual tours.

Place Matters is a ground-breaking collaboration between
Citylore and the Municipal Art Society of New York City.

City Lore

At City Lore, we abide by the definition set forth by Don Adams and Arlene
Goldbard for cultural democracy:
"that cultural diversity is a positive social value, to be protected and
encouraged...; that authentic democracy requires active participation in
cultural life, not just passive consumption of cultural products; ... that
many cultural traditions co-exist in human society, and that none of these
should be allowed to dominate and become an 'official culture'; and that equity demands fair distribution
of cultural resources and support through the society." This is also true
for narratives- there are usually no singular narrative or history that defines
a place. As Dolores Hayden suggested in her seminal Power of Place, urban places are layered and often contested. And, as Hayden also noted, the rate and scope
of change in American cities have increased quite substantially in the last
several decades. City Lore’s founder and Director, Steve Zeitlin, jokes that
New York City is a different city every ten years, and there is some truth to
and important implications in this quip.
These changes mean that places, whether individual buildings, blocks,
neighborhoods or whole boroughs are like palimpsests – the ancient parchments
that contained text that is scraped off or removed so that the parchment can be
reused, but so often the traces of the preceding texts are still visible, if
not legible, in the parchment.

Staking
claim to space and/or preventing your presence from being erased or built-over
to accommodate new narratives can be difficult. Just as New York City is one of
the so-called "high culture" (e.g., opera, classical ballet) centers
of the world, so is it one of the richest and most diverse centers of folk
culture. With a diverse staff and board, we embrace different aesthetics for
the creation of art, seek to democratize the arts, and foster a wide range of
communities, artists, and forms of artistic expression. We also aim to ensure
that these communities can exist in the places that they care about, across the
five boroughs.

We
work in four cultural domains: urban folklore and history; preservation;
arts in education; and grassroots poetry traditions. In each of these
realms, we see ourselves as furthering cultural equity and modeling a better
world with projects as dynamic and diverse as New York City itself.

City Lore serves multiple
constituencies/audiences. We have a membership base of about 400 individuals,
and a mailing and email list of about 10,000 persons who attend our events
ranging from POEMobile presentations to our museum exhibitions to the Place
Matters Awards and the People’s Hall of Fame. In addition, we have a
constituency of public school students who we serve through arts education
programs, and community audiences including the Puerto Rican, Mexican,
Dominican, African American, Native American, Brazilian, Haitian, Czech,
Russian and Chinese communities, among many others.

I believe that this holistic
approach to communities has helped to make our place-based work that much
stronger.

Place Matters

I direct Place Matters, another City Lore initiative, which works to preserve
and sustain culturally significant sites, and thereby traditions, within New
York City. At Place Matters, we work
with twin missions of:

documenting, presenting and
helping to sustain traditions and places that represent the rich diversity of
cultures that coexist in New York City

and of trying to celebrate
these traditions and places in ways that are meaningful to the practitioners or
communities who steward them

The Place Matters collaboration with the Municipal Art Society
began in 1996, when the two organizations formed a Task Force on Historical and
Cultural Landmarks and hosted a conference called "History Happened Here” at the
Museum of the City of New York. The joint initiative has introduced
preservationists and community activists on the local and national scenes to a
new way of thinking about the role of place in public life, and a new
appreciation for the ways in which non-experts can identify and sustain places
in their local landscapes that embody a broader historical record and keep
communities healthy and vibrant. One of our purposes is to propose reasons for
valuing places that go beyond architecture, and another is to consider how to
let others know that these places are important.

Virtual Place-Marking

Place Matters documents and advocates for neighborhood sites that anchor
traditions, preserve history, sustain communities and keep our cities
distinctive. At the heart of the project is the Census of Places that Matter, a
grassroots survey/ guidebook/encyclopedia of places in the five boroughs that
the public finds significant. Nominations arrive via the website, mail, and
public meetings. All nominations are posted to our online Census, and we
regularly add photos and fuller "place profiles" to the postings. The
Census is becoming a citywide survey,
encyclopedia, and guidebook rolled into one. It is also a unique inventory of
places and histories that people warrant attention and caretaking.

Census of Places that Matter, a grassroots survey/guidebook/ encyclopedia of places in the five boroughs that the public finds
significant.

By nominating sites
to this inclusive, public list, individuals and communities can broaden the
public record about meaningful places in New York City. The public will learn
more about a specific place, and through this process, will also learn more
about New York City, about what people call a "sense of place," and
about the role, or power, of place in public life.

By
educating the public about their places, nominators are also taking a step
toward advocacy. The Census provides nominators with a public platform that may
better position them to ask others for support if the place needs some kind of
help. Additionally, journalists, writers, and others may learn about these
places through the Census and help to make them more visible.

The
Census was first published as a paper document in 1998, and it has grown into a
digital registry linked to an interactive map.The rich histories of the
Census sites are now overlaid on a compelling, visual analytical tool. Together, the registry and the map offer a multi-pronged, alternative approach
to identifying, celebrating and preserving places that matter to the people and
communities who love or are concerned about them. Today, the Census includes
over 750 sites nominated by the public.

Once
you click through the map or search by borough, neighborhood, or several other
categories you will learn (in many cases) more about the site and it’s current
or past uses. On the individual
place profiles you can see the multiple nominations for an individual site.
This allows for the dialogic, for the inclusion of multiple perspectives on a
place, even if the place profile doesn’t include all of the various historical
and contemporary narratives of a place. The nominations can be added
continuously, and profiles can be changed and updates as new information or
perspectives come to us. We can also change the Census profiles to indicate when
a place no longer exists, and we do allow for what we call "ghost sites,” or
places that are no longer extant, but which exist in the memories of the people
who nominate them.

Place
Matters continues to feature a Place of the Month and a sister site, both of
which are drawn from the Census. Both places are highlighted on the front page
of our website for one month, and our monthly eblasts notify readers of the
honorees and why they were selected. These eblasts have often encouraged
readers to add their comments to existing place profiles, while others are
inspired to nominate sites not yet listed on our Census.

We were recently a partner in "Locating the Sacred,” a project of the Asian
American Arts Alliance. Locating the Sacred was a twelve-day, twenty-event
festival that brought together artists and spaces in New York for creative
explorations of the "sacred." Place Matters and the Asian
American Arts Alliance asked our constituencies to nominate sites that help to
tell individuals’ stories, and those of the Asian American communities in New
York City. Nominated sites were denoted with a star icon on the Place Matter
map through the end of the festival, but they will live on the Census
indefinitely, with the hope that they encourage further discussion about how we
interpret narratives of sacredness in the city’s ecology of places.

Real-Time Place-Marking

Over the years we have completed several place-marking projects in the real
space of New York City. Our
place-marking initiatives aim to crack the "silence" of
historical and interesting sites. Place markers can be evocative signs or other
means of revealing stories rich in human experience that are associated
with places. When a place is marked, its value becomes apparent to all. Place marking
encourages people to pay attention to their surroundings, and recognize,
protect, and care for the places that matter to them.

Since 2003, Place Matters
has been experimenting with strategies for marking interesting places to alert
passersby to their history and stories. Place-marking not only promotes
knowledge of the past, but also encourages greater appreciation for the people
and places captured in the markers. Currently, our streetside sign project
"Your Guide to the Lower East Side” can still be seen in a number of locations.
We have also held three Place Matters Awards ceremonies to honor and call
attention to sites nominated to our Census of Places that Matter. For each
Awards cycle we assembled selection committees of place-enthusiasts to chose
the awardees, who were then honored at a ceremony and given a 10"-15"
plaque identifying their site as a Place that Matters.

Signage capturing memories of place in Chinese and English,
part of "Your Guide to the Lower East Side," a place-marking project.

Beyond the Brass Plaque—Marking Places that
Matter

In spring 2003, eight
finalists in the Marking Places that Matter Ideas Competition
presented their innovative place marking strategies in an exhibition and series
of public programs at the Municipal Art Society. A jury assembled by Place
Matters had selected the finalists from a pool of entries.The
challenge was to create simple, relatively low-cost strategies that would go
beyond the traditional bronze plaque for marking and describing places around
the city. Entries would need to be visually exciting, rich in content,
adaptable to diverse environments, and user-friendly.

About the Competition

Places nominated to
our Census of Places that Matter are often of modest architectural distinction.
They do not always reach out and grab the passerby's attention, or make their
significance known. Place-marking is one way to reveal hidden secrets.

In February 2002,
Place Matters issued an open call to architects, artists, and graphic designers
to "think outside the plaque" in developing ideas for place-markers.
More than 100 design teams responded with innovative place-marker concepts—ranging from large-scale image projections to sidewalk sculpture. A jury
of public art specialists and civic leaders selected eight winning entries,
based on creative flair, feasibility, ability to engage the public, and
sensitivity to community-based histories. Winners then proceeded to transform
concepts into designs.

The schematic designs
produced by the competition finalists went on view from March 20–April 30,
2003 in an exhibition called "Marking Places that Matter: New Views on
Favorite Places," at the Urban Center Gallery at 457 Madison Ave. The exhibit presentations
offered views through time and walls, reflections on networks and patterns of
daily life, the power of the spoken word and real-life stories, and the
experience of moving through the city as explorer, resident, and tourist. All the designs use as
inspiration places drawn from the Census of Places that Matter.

Your Guide to the Lower East Side

Place Matters
sometimes works with community groups to help them make a case about why their
places are important. In the fall 2007, Place Matters, the Lower East Side
Tenement Museum, and the Lower East Side Preservation Project presented the
experiences of past and present Lower East Siders on twenty-eight signs at six
separate sidewalk locations. With photographs and text in five languages, these
place markers weave personal stories and cherished memories directly into the
landscape, often right where the stories took place. The signs reveal the rich
and diverse layers of human experience that make the neighborhood so
distinctive. They transform the participants' stories of struggle and
achievement into a legacy for all who pass by.

The collaborators found
public and private hosts for the signs. By prior agreement, the signs at Seward
Park and Straus Square came down after 6 months, but you can still see the
others:Lower East Tenement Museum (91 Orchard); P.S. 42 (71 Hester); St.
Teresa's Church (141 Henry); (Essex & Canal); and St. Augustine's Church
(290 Henry).

The Loews Canal Street
Theater at Canal and Essex is an example of a building that could be
landmarked, and probably should be, because its physical structure perfectly
conveys an important type of movie theater development, and because the LES was
important in the history of early cinema. But that’s not the only thing that
can be done to draw attention to its existence and its potential to be a
community asset.

The purpose of the project
was to make a case for preserving buildings in the area, but also to call
attention to the area’s ethnically and economically diverse population. It was
also a demonstration project that sought to develop a low cost way of creating
historical signage that marks community sites and stories from the vantage
point of insiders. The signs cost 200 a piece to fabricate. They were also
designed to be adaptable to different mounting situations.

The signs are eye-catchingly
bright, but they contain intimate stories. They place memory on the landscape,
and we hope that they still grab people’s attentions!

We collected stories, for
example from an employee of the Educational Alliance. The memory included on
the sign reads, "One amazing night a few years back we held a prom for our
older members in the Whittaker Senior Center. Some had been in Nazi
concentration camps during their own prom years, others had been too poor. They
had missed this experience. We also invited young people and everybody danced.
You’ve never seen anything like it.”

Two, which featured the
same story in Chinese and English text, contained a more distant memory from
Reverend Bayer Lee, Pastor to Chinatown churches. "Mr. C.J. Thom ran a Chinese
hand laundry at 86 Orchard Street in the 1930s.” The sign goes on to the
recollection, "My step-father came from Taishan around the same time. He lived
at 40 Bowery with many other men from his kin network and worked in hand
laundries uptown. When I worked in his laundry during my teens in the
1960s, he told me that he used to press shirts on top of the ironing table by
day and sleep underneath the same table by night. Restaurant jobs take fathers
away from jome but laundries keep them close.” These signs were installed at
the LES Tenement Museum on Orchard Street—so not entirely specific to a single
location, but represented the scores of hand laundries that existed in the LES.

Your Guide helped to make
visible longtime residents of the neighborhood who increasingly feel
marginalized as the neighborhood becomes a high rent shopping and entertainment
district. The signs are meant to represent the perspectives and experiences of
some community residents for audience of insiders and visitors.

One sign, which was
affixed to the site it represented, also identified the fact that the building
had been designated an NYC landmark in 1966. The sign went further by
identifying why the place was and is significant to the African-American
community, and why preserving it matters. The sign’s introduction reads, "St.
Augustine’s Episcopal Church built in 1828 as All Saints Free Church/
Designated a NYC Landmark, 1966.” The sign then shares the thoughts of The
Reverend Errol Harvey, Rector of St. Augustine’s. "From the ‘Slave Galleries’
you’re invisible. You can see, but can’t be seen. Black people, free and
enslaved, were forced to sit in hidden, cramped rooms above the balcony of our
church. Today, we are one of the largest African American congregations in the
Lower East Side, but with the neighborhood changing, succeeding generations
might not become aware of our history. Restoring the Slave Galleries not only
preserves our Greek Revival building, but also the memory of slavery in
American history and evidence of our important place in the community.”

To the idea of history and
memory loss across generations, each of the signs reads, "You’re always walking
in somebody’s footsteps. Who will walk in yours?”—a reminder that we are all
part of history, and history is always relevant.

And as a related, final
example, P.S. 42 on Broome/Orchard Street was represented by four signs that
chart the school’s changing attitude toward cultural diversity. The first two,
"Leaving a Place Called Home,” feature memories from Lillian Milagros Rivera
who was a student in the 1950s, and the 2007 school principal, Rosa Casiello
O’Day, each of whom faced cultural discrimination while growing up. O’Day
acknowledges that today PS 42 values its families languages and cultures. The
third sign, "Finding a Place Called Home,” features thoughts from current PS 42
teachers who were PS 42 students, and returned to teach at their alma mater
because they had such positive cultural experiences at the school. The fourth
sign, "Revisiting a Place Called Home,” features thoughts from Allan
Eng-Achson, an ELL teacher at PS 42, who tells his father’s immigration story
in class so as to encourage his students to explore their own family migration
or immigration stories.

Place Matters Awards

Our website features a
Community Toolkit, which, among other things, present the public with options
for approaching places that matter. Sometimes people want to preserve a
structure, sometimes they want to recognize a place for its having retained
long-standing use and sometimes they want to add to the narrative or contribute
to interpreting the story. Sometimes a
first or even a final step or goal is recognition and celebration of a place,
whether or not it is threatened. To we have held three Place Matters Awards
ceremonies, which have been free and open to the public.

The
first, held in 2008, on Place Matters’ 10th anniversary, honored ten
great places that highlighted ten ways that places matter and contribute to the
city of New York. Honorees included the Federation of Black Cowboys in Howard
Beach, Queens, the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center in Greenpoint,
Brooklyn, La Plaza Cultural Armando Perez in the Lower East Side of Manhattan,
Weeksville Heritage Center in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, the Snug Harbor
Cultural Center on Staten Island, and the Point Community Development
Corporation in Hunts Point in the Bronx, and several others.

In
2009 we focused on the Bronx by recognizing six places that give the Bronx its
richness, its flavor and its life. Honorees included 52 Park, an urban park,
the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, Arthur Avenue Retail Market, the Bronx
River Houses, the epicenter of the hip hop movement in its earliest days, the
General Sedgwick Houses for incubating
hip hop, and where the tenants’ association fights to keep the musical
history alive, and also the maintain the complex as affordable housing, and
Casita Rincón Criollo, possibly the oldest and the largest of the New York City
casitas build by Puerto Rican communities in many boroughs to recall the look
and feel of the Puerto Rican countryside. Rincon Criollo is also a traditional
context for the transmission of traditions, particularly those of bomba and plena, two indigenous Puerto Rican musical forms.

Last
fall, shortly after the 10th anniversary of the attacks of September
11, 2001, we honored six Lower Manhattan sites—Streit’s Matzos in the Lower
East Side, one of Lower Manhattan’s last industrial concerns, the Bowery
Mission, which has been serving the city’s homeless since 1872, the Chinatown
Senior Citizens’ Center (which is in PS 23, where the Chinatown History Project
held reunions to collect memories, and where, on the second floor, the Museum
of Chinese in America got started), Ear Inn, Economy Candy and the tenement at
109 Washington Street, one of the last vestiges of the Financial District’s
now-vanished "Little Syria” enclave.

In the first two Awards, we
gave each place a specially-designed ten-inch sign for interior or exterior
mounting. Each place was notable in its own right and also represented a way
that place matters to us all. John Wong designed the signs. American Express
Historical Preservation Fund supported the program. In the third Awards
ceremony we increased the size and changed the design of the Award so that it
was bolder and brighter. We actually used the design of the Lower East Side
signs as a model, and we think that the aesthetic was appreciated by the
Awards’ recipients.

Community Focus Projects

Place Matters works with other organizations to conduct in-depth studies
about communities and their places. The community focus projects result in
nominations to the Census of Places that Matter and a variety of educational
and protection projects. Together
with The Point Community Development Corporation in the Hunts Point
neighborhood of the Bronx, City Lore documented the Latin music and hip hop
histories of the South Bronx, focusing on the neighborhoods of Hunts Point,
Longwood and environs. The purpose of the project was to transform the
distinctive musical heritage of the Latino South Bronx into a resource that
could be tapped for cultural and civic renewal.

From the 1940s through the 1970s, hundreds of Latino musicians and dancers
lived there, including Tito Puente, Charlie and Eddie Palmieri, and Ray
Barretto. Dozens of dance halls, clubs and theaters hosted the music, and people
from all over the city came to enjoy it. By
the start of the 1970s, a deadly combination of factors precipitated the
decline of the South Bronx community. The fires that tore through the southern
part of the Bronx in the early 1970s ripped it apart. Nonetheless, its legacy
remains a deeply rooted part of Latin music history and continues to live in
the memory of musicians and audience alike for its unparalleled decades of
intense creativity. Moreover, out of the fires emerged a hard-edged urban hip hop
rooted in the streets, playgrounds, and burned-out lots of the South Bronx in
the early 1970s. During the height of the destruction, Latino and Black
teenagers, like the mambo and salsa musicians before them, held parties and
jams in schools, basements, parks and playgrounds. Tying their turntables,
speakers and amps into lampposts for power, teens gathered to rap, break, spin
and scratch records. They reclaimed their spaces and, as their parents and
grandparents had done in the 1940s and ‘50s, made the spaces work for them.

Place Matters’ Mambo to Hip Hop project is a good
example of how interpreting the story can contribute to public knowledge while
supporting historic preservation and cultural conservation. It also
demonstrates how local cultural assets can be recovered and used as a resource
for instilling pride of place and fostering renewal of the physical
environment. While not all U.S. communities may claim the same degree of
cultural influence as the South Bronx, most places offer rich stores of cultural
assets that simply are waiting to be mined.

Mambo to Hip Hop, a multi-faceted community focus project
intended to transform the distinctive musical heritage of the Latino South
Bronx into a resource for cultural and civic renewal.

The
project revolved around the partnership of Place Matters and a South-Bronx
based nonprofit, THE POINT Community Development Corporation. The theme was
popular music in the South Bronx. Our project evolved over a three year period
to tell the story of how multiple generations of predominantly Puerto Rican New
Yorkers created artistic expressions that were at once culturally specific yet
universally appealing. Focusing on the mambo, salsa, and hip hop generations
and the South Bronx neighborhood that has been both celebrated and demonized,
the project revealed how creative expression helped foster and sustain
community in the Bronx, and when the landscape looked bleakest, served as a
resource for strength and community rebuilding. The story, as it was
communicated in community conversations, musical events, and publications,
captured the historic interplay of people, place, and music that produced
internationally significant cultural movements from the late 1940s through the
present in one of the world’s least likely places.

The two organizations
came to the project via different routes. Pursuing their aims of community
empowerment and economic development, THE POINT had begun to consciously revive
the musical legacy of the area by holding tribute concerts at their facility to
honor legendary local musicians. Place Matters learned about the creative
history of the South Bronx from two separate responses to our ongoing cultural
resource survey: the Census of Places that Matter. In particular, music
historian David Carp led us to interviews and passed on written and visual
records. What galvanized our interest in particular was the notable role of
place in the story. It seemed to be the critical mass of clubs, dance halls,
local bars, candy stores, playgrounds, rooftops, and home party-giving in the
neighborhood that helped to stimulate critical bursts of creativity and create
a community of supporting fans for the new musical styles. Looking further into
the story, we learned about THE POINT and discovered our mutual interests.
Place Matters’ goals--to promote and protect the places that connect us to the
past and support vital communities--complemented those of THE POINT, and we
decided to collaborate.

Place Matters staff conducted almost three-dozen oral history interviews with
musicians, dancers, industry figures, and fans. We consulted with humanities
scholars, read historical texts, and conducted building research to determine
the history of relevant buildings. All this research formed the basis for a
variety of projects that aimed to publicize this history and preserve this
creative legacy in popular memory.

Interviewing
participants to document the past brought a host of benefits. It uncovered the
universe of places that supported the local music scenes. It legitimated the
life experiences and creative contributions of many former and current Bronx
residents. And it helped us compile a wealth of rich memory material that could
be shared with the larger public. In fact, we extended the interviewing process
to larger neighborhood public settings to create opportunities for
intergenerational panels and audiences. We knew our approach was working when a
young, female break dancer, participating in a panel with older musicians, made
an emotional statement to the audience about the new connections she was making
between her own musical attitudes and aptitudes, and those of her parents’
generation.

In addition to a
transcribed series of oral histories, the Mambo to Hip Hop project generated four local community
conversations, in which panels of
participants in the Bronx music scene shared memories, ideas, and concerns with
other community members and the general public. We arranged similar events
outside of the community on two other occasions—once at a New York City history
conference and once at a prominent Latino cultural institution in Manhattan.
Topics for all the programs focused on different aspects of the music history,
and most of the events also featured mini-performances. Panel members included
practitioners, music industry figures, professional scholars, and—to use a
useful term from folklore—community scholars (local experts who have not had
academic training). Place Matters recorded each of these events to collect
information about the individual places and the ways in which they collectively
contributed to the music’s development.

This project produced the following:

Multiple
public programs and performances

Mambo to Hip Hop map/brochure,
which put the history on the landscape and encouraged self-guided walking
tours

Walking and bus tour of heritage sites

Feature-length PBS documentary From Mambo to Hip
Hop: A South Bronx Tale

Successful listing to the National Register for Historic Places in 2001 for Casa Amadeo, in Longwood, which is the
longest-running Latin music store in New York City. This was the first Register listing to
recognize Puerto Rican migration history – it was the first place connected to
mainland Puerto Rican heritage to be listed.

Reunion concert of musicians who had graduated from the
local elementary school PS 52. The PS 52 All-Stars performed one summer night
in the park across from the school. (36) Ray Barretto and other legendary
locals showed up. Both sites—the school and the park—were significant to the
music history as well as being important community landmarks.

To
explain why so much of the Mambo to Hip
Hop project focused on interpretation of the story, rather than on
historic preservation or retaining long standing use, it is important to know
that much of the 20th century physical infrastructure of the South Bronx was
lost to the fires and political and property abandonment of the 1970s. Of the
surviving structures that once hosted music and dance—playing a role in
cultural movements of international stature—only Casa Amadeo continues the
tradition. One would never wish for this kind of historical experience. But
what the Mambo to Hip Hop
project usefully demonstrates is that historical interpretation can contribute
significantly to public knowledge, to the revival of pride of place, and to a
community’s positive hold on the future

Other community focus
projects were conducted in Central Brooklyn, the Garment District in Midtown
Manhattan, and East Harlem. Focus projects have also been thematic, such as a Labor History project undertaken in collaboration with the New York Labor
History Association where we conducted a survey and public programs to discover
places throughout the city important to the history and traditions of New
York's labor movement. We wanted to learn more about work sites, workers'
gathering places, restaurants and bars, housing developments and sites of labor
political activity.Some of the programs reached out to Labor History
Association members; others, in partnership with the artists' collective
REPOhistory, to a broader public. In the program "Tell Us A Story," for example, audience members had
five minutes to describe a place and its story. At the end of the session
everyone voted for the ten stories they thought should provide the basis
for a future NYLHA project.

One result of this Community Focus Project was the identification of the former
Asch Building, where the horrific 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire took place, as
an important site for official New York City landmarking. Place Matters
followed up on this idea and helped to secure landmark designation of the building
in 2003.

Virtual Tours

We currently are exploring better ways to present
web-based information that encourages, or even necessitates, participants to
get back out on the streets to actually visit the places they are seeing on our
website. The virtual tours that we have created tell a variety of thematic
stories, from the history of the built environment of the Bowery to a Manhattan
Jazz photo tour to a foodways tour, to an exhibit on the WPA Pools. We are
currently completing a tour of the block of East 4th Street as part of
a New York City chapter of the Vernacular Architecture Forum that asks, and
attempts to show the public (of all backgrounds), how to "see” New York’s
history in the built environment.

We
have used Tom Carter and Elizabeth Cromley’s Invitation to Vernacular Architecture as a point of departure,
because it offers an unpacking of the sometimes inaccessible, sometimes
abstruse terminology that is known (or debated) in architectural history and
preservation, but which is often left undefined for the general, non-academic
or non-practicing public. I don’t know that our definitions are much help, but
we try to intersperse the terminology in the exhibit text with concrete
examples on the block of East 4th Street, which in many ways,
typifies New York City’s development history. The block contains numerous
examples of extant typologies that represent the various phases of
working-class New York City residential building, and it also contains several
halls-for-hire, which served as public spaces for working class
communities to gather, celebrate, mourn, discuss and protest. It was almost
demolished as part of a Robert Moses-era urban renewal plan, but local
residents and activists took on Moses and the city, and not only prevented the
demolition of their buildings and the displacement of their neighbors, but
submitted an Alternate Plan, which was at least partially adopted by the city.
The Cooper Square Committee, which is what they called themselves, is still
located on the block, and their Mutual Housing Association still owns many of
the neighborhood’s low-and moderate income apartments and commercial spaces.

One
aspect of the exhibit, which I hope compliments the content of the exhibit as
well as the suggestions in the ToolKit,
is a guide to doing building research in Manhattan. It’s easy enough to say
"and then you go visit private and special collections and gather historical
documents,” but it’s not so easy to do, even for professionals. So we’ve
offered some repositories, and a possible order of operations, for looking for
maps, building records, drawings, photographs, and census records to help
people who have not conducted building research, and who do not have access to
private collections, take on the take of the information gathering. We call it
"being a history detective,” so that it doesn’t sound like there is an
obviously linear method that will result in all of the "right” answers, and so
that it doesn’t sound boring.

This
block is part of an area that was just designated the East Village/Lower East
Side Historic District. There is certainly distinction that goes along with
this designation, but we are hoping to collaborate with local arts and
education groups to turn this project into an educational place-marking project
wherein, using the exhibit as a foundation, students would be asked to research
the block further, and either design physical place-markers or create an
app-based scavenger hunt-type game for mobile devices. Such gaming platforms
already exist, and we are currently exploring the best options for thinking of
the educational program in this way.

I conducted several interviews with long-time residents and business people,
which we would like to use at some point, although they are a bit a field of
the themes explored in the exhibit itself. We might try to make a tour on
City Lore’s City of Memory map, but we will see.

We
are also hoping to expand the Your Guide to the Lower East Side marking project
to the Two Bridges neighborhood, a community roughly bounded by the Manhattan
and Brooklyn Bridges, which is part of what has been called the fertile
crescent of public housing in New York City along the East River. We are taking
steps toward developing a community focus project with the Two Bridges
Neighborhood Council, and will begin conducting outreach on November 3, 2012.